Ken Foster’s “I’m a Good Dog” explores pit-bull myths and history – and why their owners love a dog that many shudder at.

When Ken Foster’s book landed on my desk, I had to open it. That cover photo of a full-on pit-bull grin, the legendary teeth and giant tongue unabashedly displayed, drew me in (props to photographer Karen Morgan). I know, and respect, that this photo would make many people shudder rather than smile. So, full disclosure: I grew up with boxers and throughout life, I’ve had some giant, sloppy, affectionate dog faces right up in mine – but never, fortunately, an aggressive one. When I see that photo, my reaction is to grin (and prepare to dodge slobber).

“I’m a Good Dog: Pit Bulls, America’s Most Beautiful (and Misunderstood) Pet (Viking Studio, 2012) reveals author Foster as a pit-bull partisan, a man in love and on a mission.

Numbers sell, and if you wanted to sell a cookbook or a health book or a home decor book, you tout “150 Elegant House Plans” or “100 Best Herbal Cures” or “300 Organic Time-Saving Rodent Deterrents.” (I’m sure there are marketing folks who know why this works).

I hate preachy cookbooks. If I wanted to be told what to eat, I’d go back 40 years in time and live with my parents. Even some of the gorgeous back-to-the-land, know-your-photogenic-farmer I-raised-this-goat-by-hand cookbooks out this year can strike a note of religious righteousness.

I don’t want a sermon. I just want some great food to keep me company when I break from my garden chores this weekend: cutting ornamental grass, tidying perennials, pruning roses, organizing my seeds …

Even if Dragonwagon’s name wasn’t already whimsical (a press release explains: 16-year-old hippie changes her name in the ’60s, then once she launches a writing career, kind of gets stuck with it) the book is damn fun.

Through the two recent blizzards, I’ve been riding light rail to work and enjoying “Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver,” by Diane Ott Whealy, my nose stuck deep into its ivory, photo-sprinkled pages.

"Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver," by Diane Ott Whealy

Seed-saving used to seem the high holy of garden geekdom, and even after a long how-to session at Abbondanza Organic Seeds & Produce, more trouble than I had time for. Then I tasted a tomato from a farmer’s market that I just had to have more of, and learned how easy it is to save tomato seeds because of how the plants pollinate. For many plants, though, it’s not easy to save seeds that you can be sure will produce another generation that’s like their parents.

But it is essential. If you’re reading this, you probably are hip to the world of flavor and variety in, say, an heirloom tomato. You might have even read one of Amy Goldman’s wonderful books on heirloom tomatoes, melons, or squash.

Heirloom vegetable seeds don’t just produce themselves. They have to be planted, kept pure, and then specially harvested and treated. The people who do this work are keeping history and tradition alive, preserving our food supply’s genetic diversity, and its beauty, and its flavor.

Today, if the varieties your grandparents and great-grandparents grew are available, you can get them in large part thanks to people like Diane Ott Whealy and Kent Whealy, who founded what was to grow into Seed Savers Exchange back in the 1970s, when her grandfather bequeathed some special morning glory and tomato seeds. (Kent, from Kansas, and Diane, from Iowa, actually met here in Colorado in Estes Park).

“Gathering: Memoir of a Seed Saver” tells the story of SSE’s genesis: 29 gardeners who sent 25 cents and a large envelope to the “True Seed Exchange” in northern Missouri. Those gardeners got a six-page publication listing seed other gardeners were willing to share. The year after that, the group was 142 people and the seed listing was rolled out on a mimeograph machine.

Soon after, Seed Savers Exchange established itself as a national non-profit. Since then, its membership has grown to more than 13,000; it has permanent grounds at Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, with an orchard of hundreds of heirloom apple trees and rare-breed cattle. The annual yearbook, full of thousands of people willing to share heirloom seed, lands with a big “thup” in a mailbox, complete with seed descriptions and contact information. Maine gardening guru Eliot Coleman speaks at the farm’s annual campout.

It wasn’t easy. Diane Ott Whealy’s memoir, which reads like a story she’d tell you if you sat next to her at a big Iowa family reunion, is frank about what it took to build an institution that both she and her then-husband believed in, to the point of going without health insurance for themselves. They had day jobs and often night jobs for many years while devoting every spare moment to Seed Savers. The bean seeds — numbering in the thousands, that a collector entrusted to them — lived in their basement.

Their five children got tired of hearing them talk about seed saving. In fact, the couple envisioned Heritage Farm — a permanent place to anchor their mission — on a country drive when the kids had challenged them them not to bring up seeds the entire time. They had given this dream 15 years of their lives and all of their energy when, in 1990, Kent Whealy was given a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. It meant that they could, for the first time in their married lives, buy a safe car.

This is how it all happened: piles of letters on a desk; oak cases of bean seeds in their basement; farmers and gardeners sharing knowledge, stories, recipes. One farmer responded to a radio interview with Kent and Diane and wrote in to say he had seeds for a melon they’d been searching for. The melon was Moon & Stars, a beautiful, yellow-fleshed melon with a golden blob and smaller golden speckles. It’s that melon variety that Judith Ann Griffith illustrates on the book’s jacket, surrounded by its foliage, bedecked with a speckled Eastern tiger salamander.

It’s a beautiful book that’s both stylish and homey; a story of planting a seed, believing in its rightness, and giving it all that you have.

It swept in Wednesday and stayed around through early Thursday morning, left a lovely reminder of itself in a Friday fog, just enough to linger in the hollows, not enough to snarl my commute.

I came out Friday morning to find my mesclun well-muscled, my chard seedlings charged, my broccoli raab looking like it might someday make a me a meal instead of just thinnings to crunch while weeding.

And look, look: bright little marble sized tomatoes, fully ripened on the two patio plants I’d just about given up on, hankering to take over their pots for more lettuce. (If your produce is pumped on last week’s rain, whip out your digital camera and show it off here. You could win a great edible gardening book!)

Let’s not be thinking about the fact that the rain will nurture weed seeds as well as grass seeds, thistles as well as thyme. Let’s roll over and wallow in the fact that, while it’s falling, we shouldn’t really be out there weed-whacking or fertilizing or, duh, watering (and yes, on a walk last Wednesday night in my subdivision, I saw automatic sprinklers going full blast in the greenbelt). We should snuggle deeper into the blankets and plan and plot and ponder.

If you’re looking at your seed packets, either itching to get them in the ground or started indoors, or being all smug because you did that last weekend, just take a moment to give thanks for seed banks.

Susan Dworkin's "The Viking in the Wheat Field"

No, I mean seriously. Even if all you’re planting this year are trusty hybrids (and I understand that; I plant some myself). Even if you think your penchant for heirloom veggies is a bit of a folly, just a gardener’s indulgence. If you eat wheat in any form, you may someday be more dependent on the work of seed banks than you care to think about right now.

Why? Plant geneticists are racing against a variety of wheat disease called UG99. They’re trying to breed in resistance to this strain of stem rust before the disease circles the globe in the way of all nasty things we’d like to keep confined within tidy little borders. They hope that the resistance they seek is stored — guess where — in the genetic vaults of seed banks.

Check it out in the book “The Viking in the Wheat Field,” a biography of Bent Skovmand, by Susan Dworkin, and the transcript of an interview with her. By the way, Skovmand was adamantly opposed to the patenting of genes in plant material, calling it akin to patenting every word in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It was standing, gaping, skipping, wandering, and strolling-room-only last Monday at the Denver Botanic Gardens’ free day. OVER FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE had come through the gates by 4 p.m. (I still got a parking place in the new garage at 1. Pretty cool.)

I was stunned by two things: How many people brought their children; and how awed many of those kids were. One nine-year-old asked a volunteer coordinator, “Where are the pollinators in the Conservatory?” — a great question because there was much in the Conservatory that’s burst into bloom, including this incredible thing called a clock vine, (Thunbergia mysorensis, to you botanists, and you know who you are) which drapes golden, purple-throated orchid-like blossoms down on gossamer stalks to gape right in your face as you walk under a trellis. The answer is that many of the pollinators are ants. And they’re in the Conservatory — you just have to slow down and stay put to watch for them. Staying put, of course, is not something you can try in the midst of a shoulder-to-shoulder free-day crowd, but I’ll try it on another visit.

Another pair of kids, a brother and sister who couldn’t have been long out of kindergarten, stood in awe in front of a five-foot-tall tree yucca. “Wow, Mom, it’s huge,” one said. And then they directed Mom to take a picture — without them even in it.

It’s not that brilliant, Colorado sunshine bouncing off of snow isn’t gorgeous, but if you’re like me, you’re ready to contemplate something different, and I don’t mean the snow mold that turf types are worried is burgeoning beneath those brilliant banks of white.

I mean something like this.

Rosa glauca. If you had this big, beautiful rose, right now its red branches and stunning rose hips would be showing up against those white snowbanks. You’d be looking forward to its pink and white blooms and deep-purple foliage.

Glauca is one of the seven plants that Plant Select, a collaboration between the Denver Botanic Gardens, Colorado State University and the green industry in Colorado, chose for its 2010 introductions. They do this every year, and every year I feel like Steven Martin in that old comedy sketch, yelling, “The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!” I can’t wait in January to see just what they’ve picked. This year there are some old standbys, plants that people in Colorado know about and grow, but that were little known beyond the Front Range.

If only I’d known growing food was so easy: the FarmVille app on Facebook is apparently the new digital hangout, according to the New York Times. It’s taking college kids away from their books and husbands away from their pregnant wives. All because they’ve gotta harvest their virtual soybeans.

No dirt, no bugs, no broken fingernails, no rotator-cuff injuries.

Of course, you can’t tear up your FarmVille swiss chard and make a frittata out of it. But that’s the only drawback I’m seeing.

Becky Hensley is the co-founder of Share Denver - a community craft space in Park Hill. She's also the proud Ninja-in Chief of the Denver Craft Ninjas -- a women’s crafting collective dedicated to keeping the DIY spirit alive through laughter, shared skills, and cocktails.

Colorado native Mark Montano is an international designer, artist, author and television personality. He has appeared on TLC’s “While You Were Out” and “10 Years Younger,” as well as “My Celebrity Home” on the Style Network, “She’s Moving In” on We TV, “The Tony Danza Show” on ABC, and “My Home 2.0” on Fox.